The ARMada Cluster
Build Your Own Cluster: Step-by-Step Guides from ARMada!
Explore our tutorials and learn how to create your own Orange Pi cluster
A passion project
Hello! I’m Vex and I’ve had a vision for a very long time. Mid year, 2024, I started building this idea. The seeds of my vision started when I saw Uptime Lab’s CM4 Blade concept. I really like the concept, a CM4 with one NVMe slot, I figured, ‘Hey, one compute for each OSD, 19 wide would make a great little Ceph cluster.’
I’ve already had a few architecture changes to this project. I started out using the Raspberry Pi 5b but after three nodes in I switched to the Orange Pi 5 Pro. For slight more per unit, this Single Board Computer has an NVMe slot built in, a faster core speed CPU with 4 additional cores, up to 16 GB, versus 8 GB, of RAM and it is, more or less, compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5b PoE hats. Plus, for reasons that will become apparent, if you follow my odyssey, we can cram four additional compute clusters.
My plan is to chronicle this journey, such that the viewer can follow, learn and if they’re so inclined, build their own ARMada Pi cluster. Along the way I’ll shamelessly pander for donations and share affiliate links to the hardware I’ve purchased to help fuel my expensive addiction in a poorly veiled, ‘buy me a coffee,’ way. I will explain the pitfalls, the alternatives, what could be done better, the todos and the bugs I hit.
I’ve been asked repeatedly, ‘why are you building this? what is the purpose?,’ and to that I say; I’m building this cluster to provide some private cloud storage. I want to learn how to work around complications. I also want to learn new methods and continually get better at it. Presently I’m trying to build a load balanced web server on a LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, PHP) stack. Right now everything so far is ARM, end to end, including the t4g.nano AWS instance that’s powering the DNS resolution.